Homework

It wasn't perfect, and that's why it's so cool. Lots of emotion, and you can tell it's from a true story. And catch Betty Thomas! I saw it on Showtime a long time ago but I just rented it and it really brought back memories. Joan Collins' role is short but bitchin.

This movie was billed as the next best thing to "Private Lessons". The movie was marketed on the misperceived sex goddess status of Joan Collins. She never goes Mary Kay LeTourneau. All you get to see is a really weak teen soap opera. My sister, her fiancé,and I went to this movie and left it with the same reaction we had to Porkies; a triumph of marketing for not a lot of movie. Joan Collins does some flashbacks of her youth and then she was an active participant in romance; it was a low level rip off of the Graduate. The teen band sequence was a bad version of the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland OK kids, let's put on a show. The end was not even very climactic; the two male leads walking out of a movie theater and talking of trying to make a movie just like when they started a band.

A young man sits doing his math homework. He pulls out a porno mag and begins to fantasize about the model in the magazine being photographed by some other guy. This would make sense if he were gay, and wants to become a fashion photographer. But he is supposed to be straight. If the picture led him to fantasize, wouldn't the fantasy be sexual somehow?

The boy has a more interesting fantasy a little bit later, where he imagines himself comatose in hospital due to lack of sex, and has two sexy nurses, one of whom bares her breasts.

The movie appears to have a better budget than most '80s teen sex comedies. It features more locations and actors, though no one makes any impression.

I believe the movie is supposed to be about a young man, luckless in sex, being seduced by Joan Collins. She is barely in it, and all her scenes seem separate from the rest of the movie. No wonder - according to Wikipedia, they were filmed two years apart from the rest of the "movie". The whole thing has the same disconnected feeling.

There is a smoking hot French teacher, who should have been the one to seduce the protagonist - not Collins. In one bizarre scene, she offers to tutor one of the other kids, and he comes to her house and talks to her in fluent French, impressing her. She speaks English, presumably because the actress couldn't fake it in French. Why didn't they just make her a science teacher or something?

Google offers some hints about Collins' lack of real participation: she filmed her part two years before the rest, in a minor role, and the filmmakers edited the movie - and marketed it - to make it look like she played a main role. She sued them, particularly for using a body double in a later scene to make it look like she got naked.

B-movie god Wings Hauser makes an appearance at the halfway mark. He apparently plays some kind of rock star. What is he doing in this movie?

There are also scenes with an African American family that don't seem related to the movie's main story, if you can really say it has one.

The kid speaking French to his teacher is apparently, actually, French. I don't know why they didn't introduce that earlier. This movie is very confusing.

The protagonist finally meets Collins with only fifteen minutes left to go. So much for the whole "virginal loser seduced by sexy Dame" plotline.

And then the movie ends, without having resolved, or even really established, anything.

Thank god it's over.

I had never heard about this 1982 movie titled "Homework", from director James Beshears, prior to stumbling upon it by random chance here in 2025. And with it being a movie that I had never seen before, of course I opted to check it out and give it a fair chance.

The storyline in the movie, as written by Maurice Peterson and Don Safran, failed to entertain me. The movie felt insanely random and erratic, as the narrative was all over the place, yet nowhere all at once.

But I suppose that fans of Joan Collins might enjoy this movie, in some odd and bizarre way, as you get to see her without a top.

Of the entire cast ensemble, I was only familiar with Joan Collins and Wings Hauser. The acting performances in the movie were fair. The acting performances in the movie were fair, despite the fact that the storyline was rubbish.

The music in the movie was insanely annoying to listen to.

This is definitely not a movie that I would recommend you to waste 89 minutes on watching.

My rating of director James Beshears's 1982 movie "Homework" lands on a generous two out of ten stars.

This has to be one of the worst movies I have ever seen. I assume that was supposed to build on movies like Fame as well as your usual teen high school comedy, but this movie fails in every aspect. At less than 90 minutes, the film is still too long and boring, the dialogue is rather silly and the music/rock star image being portrayed is quite odd, even for the time. The movie features some gratuitous nudity, but even these scenes are rather dumb. The whole styling reminds me of Boogie Nights era adult movies, but is seriously lacking in appeal. Most of the actors were (and stayed) unknown, at least one scene is done with a body double.

If you see this movie advertised in your TV program guide, my suggestion is change the channel immediately and watch Class instead.